Making History® delivers the open-ended gameplay of strategy-game classics, but with compelling new economic, military, and diplomatic systems and deep research that lets you play with real historical challenges.

Buy Making History®: The Calm & the Storm

About This Game

Making History® delivers the open-ended gameplay of strategy-game classics, but with compelling new economic, military, and diplomatic systems and deep research that lets you play with real historical challenges.

The game drops you into a rich WWII world where every nation has its own agenda, and where events can turn on a single alliance. Work with your nation's historic strengths and weaknesses. Build up your industry, infrastructure, economy, military. Create alliances. Then reshape your strategy as the world evolves with each turn.

Rich WWII world: MAKING HISTORY: The Calm & the Storm includes over 80 nations and 800+ regions. Each nation is given detailed characteristics built on extensive research, including economic and military strengths, diplomatic relations, ideology, and technical advancement. Each region features terrain, infrastructure, resource production and more.

You are your Nation: Jump into a world in motion where every nation is pursuing its own agenda, and where events can turn on the breaking of a single alliance. Devise strategies based on your nation's historic strengths and weaknesses' and revise your plans as the world evolves in response to your actions. Play as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the USSR, the United States, or China.

Multi-Turn Combat: An innovative combat system allows many approaches to engagements from massive assaults to holding actions. Supplies, reinforcements and geography all affect your battle plan.

More Military Options: Use unique unit abilities to blitzkrieg with armor, fight attrition battles with hordes of infantry, decimate enemy industry with strategic bombers, and bomb fleets from a distance with a carrier task force. With scientific research you can unlock more advanced military units, and every unit features a detailed 3D model.

Sophisticated World Economy: The game's economic system models the connections between world power and economic strength. Players control trade, aid, industrial development, infrastructure investments, and a deep field of research.

Powerful Alliance System: As you make and break alliances, declare war and propose peace, each action affects your relations with other nations, and their willingness to ally with you. If you lack strong allies, you may find other nations are more are more likely to attack.

Historic Scenarios: Six scenarios let you start at a crucial historic moment, focus on a specific event, or play the whole war. Scenarios cover the fall of France, Pearl Harbor, the D-Day invasion of Europe, the Sudeten crisis and more, and each is based on detailed research. You can work to succeed where others failed, or take a different path and see what happens.

Superb replayability: Each scenario drops you into a different firestorm. Each nation you play presents unique challenges. Everything evolves from your economic and military choices, the alliances you make, and the actions and reactions of the world's other nations.

Single and Multiplayer Turn-Based Gameplay: Innovative simultaneous-turn-based play is quick and responsive, and keeps you in control with no waiting. Play with up to eight others in multiplayer mode, using in-game chat to devise joint strategies and secret pacts. Will you be a trusted ally or a backstabbing tyrant?

Built for Modding: Use included Scenario Editor to modify scenarios or create your own.

After i managed to get Croatia it's independence i decided to randomly start war against it, because i got bored after i gave entire Russia and Europe to it.(Yes, Croatia had control over Russia and Europe, Croatia stronk)

So, Croatia firstly made an alliance with Brazil, because there is no more random country when it comes to war against Croatia and Germany. The allied with Poland, i was amused.

Then Croatia formed the "Fascist state of Albania". I died laughing.

This game has nothing to do with WWII. Here you do whatever the hell you want.

This is a great game, though it does get tiring clicking on so many cities once you get large enough. The difficulty curve makes sense. If you want to face resistance, go "normal". If you want a real war, go "hardest". But if you just want to have fun and conquer the world, choose "easiest" difficulty and choose Germany.

Overall, this is an enjoyable game, save for two things: the aforementioned monotonous clicking and a very, very annoying bug that makes it impossible to play the game due to an error concerning the game's apparent inability to find its own engine. When this happens, the only thing that will help is to restart Steam in Administrator mode and launch it from there. It should work then.

Due to me putting 130+ hours into the game, I feel like I have a right to review it.

Compared to other games such as Europa Universalis or any other Grand Strategy game, The Calm & the Storm is pretty simplistic when it comes to gameplay. Diplomacy is simple and combat is relatively easy to learn.

One thing I will mention though, is that the world market is your best friend. if you play as anyone but the U.S USSR or Germany (I'm not sure about the U.K or China) then you will become dependent to the world market. Surprisingly, the same goes to self-sufficient countries if you want to keep a fairly steady income.

That's all I'm going to mention about the game because if you download custom scenarios (which I HIGHLY recommend) then the gameplay, research, resource consumption, world market, etc will change depending on the scenario.

For an example, I downloaded a scenario that let me played as the Holy Roman Empire in 1936, I fought the Nazis, conquered Europe, and fought the USSR and the U.K as a pro-Fascist SuperPower. Yes, Hitler was beaten by Julius Caesar.

I definitely recommend this to anyone who wants to get into Grand Strategy games. This is a good place to start with it's cheap price and its simple gameplay mechanics.

Best 99 cents I've ever spend. I'd have even paid the full price, maybe more for it. At first you might think: "EWW DIS GAME IS FROM 2007 IZ SO OLD AND DA GRAPHIZ IS SHIET SO IT MUST BE BAD". If you think so, you're wrong. It's one of the best games i've ever played, I got addicted from playing the demo and persuaded my friends to buy it too cause they thought the same as I mentioned earlier. But hell, this game is f*cking fun! Play in single- or multiplayer (LAN connection or Hamachi) with maximum 8 players as one if the leading nations in WW2 (Italy, Germany, UK, US, France, China, USSR, Japan) in 6 different scenarios in the time before and in WW2 (20th Jul 1936 - 1st Oct 1945, 1st Sep 1938 - 30th Mar 1939, 1st Sep 1939 - 19th Oct 1945, 1st Aug 1940 - 4th Oct 1945, 7th Dec 1941 - 7th Oct 1945, 6th Jun 1945 - 9th Oct 1945). In singleplayer you can even play as one of the "smaller" Nations (afghanistan, spain, etc...). It's really realistic and shows many aspects, not only "I HAVE MOAR TROOPS SO I WIN BATTLE" but also how advanced the troops are, how many arms were produced for them and which vehicles support them. Combine war tactics, alliances, production, research and trading on the world market to push up your nation in war. Before you start a game you can either pick if the biggest alliance, nation or ideology wins in the end.

I had only played the Gold version before and now that I picked this gem on Steam for under a euro I can say - they are very different. At first I thought that the only difference is the lack of some campaign scenarios - mainly the one that starts at 1933 and gives you so much time to develop them unstoppable armies! But after I played one of the shorter ones I came to some conclusions:

the color palettes are a bit off and not so smooth on my eyes - easily changed in the Gold version

the infrastructure is VERY slow to develop - really 72 turns to upgrade one level? And I thought Gold taking 17 turns was slow.

HUGE maintenance costs! Why spend 1/5th of the campaign in upgrading a slot if in the end it will cost half your GDP to maintain? No such problem in Gold.

at first I thought "Why does research cost so little points? Now I can pump Heavy tanks before everyone else!" - yeah but no - research is compleatly RNG based so even at full IPU those 25 research poins can take 100+ turns to make...

all units have only one combat "value" which makes gameplay blunt as it doesn't matter what armies you build. In Gold each unit has Attack and Defense - this for instance makes infantry very hard to deal with and while tanks have huge attack power they are probably the first to fall in battle due to low defense.

a lot of other nitpicks that I could point out but they aren't that gamebreaking.

What I am trying to get at is this - there are a lot of balance issues with the game but chances are unless you've played the Gold version, you might not notice some at all and thats good. Just letting you know there is a better version out there that is currently not on Steam. That being said I still think this series is amazing.

i like the game, but it keeps saying that the license key is invalid every time i want to play it and no matter how many times i uninstall and reinstall it, IT KEEPS DOING THAT AND I CAN'T PLAY THE GAME!! If the game stops doing this, i'll give it a positive review.

MH: TCatS is one of the better WWII strategy games available on Steam.

The game offers a nice balance of the need to balance Trade and Economy and Military Expansion. It is not as in depth as concurrence games like Hearts of Iron, but this makes the game very Casual friendly without losing its charme for core players like me.

You can play as a nation of the given scenario time, by standard between 1936 and 1944 (so around World War II obviously). That obviously includes nations like the Soviet Union, the USA and Nazi Germany, but also stuff like Liberia, Bhutan and Guatemala. Great variety of nations. The weaker a nation is, the harder it gets for the player. (You can also set the difficulty out of 7 different difficulties to make enemy AIs more aggressive and well thinking in battle and allied AIs more cowardly and bad thinking in battle.)

One of the big upsides of the game is the real in depth Map Editor, that lets you change special properties of the map like the size of army and the exact position of cities, but also basic properties like which region belongs to which nation and creating new cities, resources, nations etc. The only thing negative is that the Editor targets towards more casual players. Changing flags and emblems of nation, as well as the relation and the behavior of AIs is only able to be changed by going into Editor .xml files and changing the codes. It lets you create stuff like WWI or Modern World or completely fantastic scenarios, but you cannot change the Planet itself sadly. Id love to play in the world of Dungeons & Dragons, WarCraft, etc., but sadly it is not given.

The BIGGEST upside is the Multiplayer of the game. It is really fun, but first off is the community pretty small, so bring some friends to play MP. Also, you mostly need a LAN device to find the servers, Id recommend playing on a LAN party or using Hamachi or better Tunngle (better networks, server and better stabilized).

Over all a pretty great game, even though the expansion to the Gold version, as well as the also pretty good second part of the franchise, is missing on Steam.

This game could help give people a better understanding of just how fragile the eco system of war is, giving them a sense of realism that is not found in most other strategy games. Unfortunately it's that same level of realism that might make this game unplayable for other gamers.

i only have a little bit of time in this game but i can tell you now that this is a real serious rts, economy is your worst enemy. Pros-be ANY nation you wish-very indepth administration aspects -canada is OP-change the course of history (want hitler to win? go for it)

cons-not good for casual gaming-not a very friendly User interface-not as "addicting" as other rts/4x games such as Civ 5 or AOE

Very fun UNTIL you run out of coal during the war, at which point NO ONE wants to sell any and unless you have a 2 billion dollar coushon your economy is going to tank, this was playing as mexico anyway, basically I've found that there is a lot of skipping to the next turn because you have to skew your build more towards economy than military or research, as far as the actual combat goes, eh not TOO exciting but it'll give you a kick the first few times, however Civ V has better looking combat but less realistic strategy so it's a horse a piece, also if you play as mexico... DO NOT ATTACK THE SMALL PEEPS. IDC HOW TEMPTING IT LOOKS DO NOT. YOU WILL RUIN THE REST OF THE GAME FOR YOURSELF.

Awesome game if you like fighting in the WW2 era. Its not overly complicated, yet its very competitive for you and your friends. Definately my current favorite strategy game of all time. If you like Risk and/or Axis and Allies you would like this. Always looking for more people who enjoy the game to play with.

This game isnt the best strategy game, granted, however it is about World War 2, which is real life history. You can simulate it how you want to, and might be suprised with some of the alliances formed! You can also use the Modern History Editor which allows you to change lots of areas of the game, like territory. So much fun, especially if you are winning! Its definitely worth a buy as it is cheap and fun!